


the way he turns to someone who is not there

by a_novel_idea



Series: wait [3]
Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Guardians of the Galaxy - All Media Types
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-08
Updated: 2015-04-08
Packaged: 2018-03-21 20:26:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3704081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_novel_idea/pseuds/a_novel_idea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Saal never tells her that he is Marked, predestined to be the second half of someone else, but then, he doesn’t need to. It’s in the way he sleeps at night, hand caressing the black mark on his skin, as if he could summon comfort just from the thought of it; it’s in the way he seeks companionship, hardly more than thawing silences, but never so quiet as when he is alone. It’s in the way he is always looking over his shoulder, and the way he turns to someone who is not there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the way he turns to someone who is not there

Garthan Saal doesn’t dream.

It’s a condition Miranda has never deemed fit to investigate, but she has wondered if it’s something about the man’s biological makeup, or if years on the battlefield have left him blank of anything other than nightmares. It’s noted in his medical file, with no explanation attached, so she’s not the only one to have noticed, but maybe the only one to be concerned. She knows he doesn’t’ have any family left, and he isn’t close with anyone in the Corps, not after the last disaster of a mission he survived; he doesn’t have anyone to look after his daily habits and question if they stay the same because he wants them to, or because he doesn’t know another way to live.

Miranda ponders these things, awake against all odds after more time than she cares to count bouncing between operating theaters and patients.  She kicks off her shoes and pulls her scrubs tighter around her shoulders as she crashes out on a cot in Saal’s room; the constant chirp of the heart monitor soothes her worries. It’s been an exhausting thirty-seven hours, and she would hate to lose her favorite patient after such a fight.

***

Miranda Röthääs is not Marked, and she was not born Miranda Röthääs.

When she was a child, she was relived; to be Marked among the Unwrel was to be set aside and left to die as weak. She was so lucky, her parents had told her, to have a soul born to one body, to be complete without the aid of another. She was strong on her own, and she would never need another as long as she was true to herself, and loyal to their people. And with the ignorance and naivety of a child, she believed them.

She was a fierce child, willing only to work alone, as she was convinced she would never need another, and she trained as the male children did, despite being told that she should be studying the ways of their people, that she would one day take up her mother’s mantle as the matriarch of their house and rule only second to her husband. She merely scoffed and claimed that she would take no husband. For the first third of her life, here elders were amused by her, second to none in either her schooling or her fighting, but, like things do in an ever evolving universe, things changed.

When her mother fell ill, and the elders and her father decided it was time for her to settle down and cast aside her childish wishes, to take up the responsibilities of her house and consider one of the candidates put forward for husbandry, she denied them. She would be only who she wanted to be, as her parents, her mother, had taught her. When they persisted, she simply left.

She traveled for many years, under several names, before taking up the mantle of Miranda and planting herself in the middle of the fiercest battles fought by the Kree and the Xandarians. She fought as an army of one, able to take on more opponents that any Xandarian could alone, but she grew weary of death and sickness and sorrow, and turned eventually to medicine. She found that she could not save as many people as she could slay, but that there was something beautiful in the way that those who had fallen could rise again.

While in the middle of her training, Miranda heeded a call to a small border planet called Mirach, and threw herself into the fray of a devastated planet. She lost more than she saved, and she wept more than she had in a long time, but by the end of her stay, she was bringing with her the most precious thing she had ever managed to snag: a friend.

Although furious and grieving, Garthan Saal never treated her with anything less than respect, despite the willingness of others to do so. She had long ago learned that Unwrel was a foul word on the tongues of most people, and she had come to accept their words as ignorance. But something resonated with Garthan Saal that Miranda had never felt before: an understanding that one was not defined by their parents, or their people, and certainly not by a happenstance mark that appeared, or didn’t, at random.

***

Miranda wakes to a soft scuffling in the room. She sits up, instincts telling her that something is not right, not if Saal is moving this soon after surgery, and especially not if Saal is not the one making noise. She’s unsteadily on her feet the moment her brain catches up, and she manages to startle the newest occupant in the room.

He’s hunched in the opposite corner of the room, well away from the side of Saal’s bed, just watching. He hasn’t spotted Miranda yet, for all she must have made noise just trying to get back to her feet after so little sleep, and Miranda takes the moment to try and identify him. He’s taller than she is, that’s for sure, but probably not taller than Saal, with reddish blond hair and several days’ worth of stubble on his face. He looks familiar, but with the panic and hysteria of the last forty-eight hours, Miranda can’t make her brain work enough to place him.

“Can I help you?” she asks, and the other man jumps, clearly startled by her presence.

He drags his eyes away from Saal, but even from where Miranda is standing, she can tell he is hesitant to do so. He shakes his head wordlessly at her, and turns to slink back out the door, but his eyes return to Saal and he hesitates. Miranda doesn’t say anything, just keeps her eyes firmly planted on his form as if she could stop him from doing anything with just the look in her eye.

When he’s finally gone, slunk back off to wherever he managed to come from, Miranda keys the lock on the door, entering her hospital ID number and barring anyone other than fellow nurses and doctors from entering the room. She collapses back onto the cot she’d whisked out of a storage closet, and sets the alarm on her END to wake her after she’s had another ten hours of solid sleep.

***

When Miranda wakes again, the room is quiet, and she takes a moment to roll around before convincing herself that she really does need to stand up. She stumbles off of the cot, still exhausted even after what her internal clock says was a much too lengthy sleep, and halts mid-stretch because the same man from the night before is sleeping in the chair by Saal’s bed.

“What the hell,” she mutters to herself, immediately reaching for the door’s console and checking the entry log.

The name logged as the last entry is completely unfamiliar, but the small green symbol next to it is not.

***

Saal never tells her that he is Marked, predestined to be the second half of someone else, but then, he doesn’t need to. It’s in the way he sleeps at night, hand caressing the black mark on his skin, as if he could summon comfort just from the thought of it; it’s in the way he seeks companionship, hardly more than thawing silences, but never so quiet as when he is alone. It’s in the way he is always looking over his shoulder, and the way he turns to someone who is not there.

***

Peter Quill wakes to the soft, steady rhythm of a heart monitor, and the harsh smell of over steeped tea. He rubs both his eyes, and doesn’t remember falling asleep. His head hurts, his neck hurts; hell, his everything hurts. His vision is blurry, clouded over by the reluctance to wake, but he can tell that someone else is sitting across from him on the other side of the hospital bed. He tries to blink the sleepiness away, and is only somewhat successful.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” the other person asks, and if it had been any longer than a few hours Peter wouldn’t have recognized the voice of the nurse he found napping in Saal’s room the night before.

“What?”

“Tea,” she says again, standing from her chair and rounding the bed to shove a cup at his chest until he either takes it or she spills it on him. “It’s Valeryian. Very relaxing. Very comforting when you just found out your mark match is laying near-death in the hospital.”

Peter chokes on the tea in his mouth and ends up sputtering it down his shirt. When he is finally calm enough to breathe correctly, he looks up at the woman on the other side of the bed and tries to take her measure. She looks Terran, and could pass easily as such if it weren’t for the unnatural grey-yellow of her eyes. She’s shorter than he is, slim enough to pass as tiny, and calm to the point of alarming the instincts Peter thought he had left behind with the Ravengers.

“How did you know?”

“The entry system keeps a log of everyone that comes and goes. You’re already in the system.”

Peter curses and slumps further in his chair.

“So how long have you known?” she asks, and it’s a surprisingly hard question.

“What does it matter to you?” he responds, eyes narrowing.

“Because if I find out,” she says leaning forward in her seat, “that you left my best friend to stagger along alone through one of the most depressing periods of his life, I will dismember you as painfully as possible, and toss you piece by piece from the roof while you beg me to stop.”

Peter is quite surprised by the answer.

_“How long?”_

“Nova Prime told me yesterday.”

She watches him closely, watches for any sign of a lie, a hesitation that could indicate something other than the complete and utter truth. Peter doesn’t fidget, doesn’t look away; he just sits and waits for her to come to her own decision.

“Miranda,” she says eventually.

“Peter.”

“Nice to meet you Peter.”

Miranda stands from her chair and nods at him before vacating the room.

***

Miranda Röthääs brings Saal back to Xandar, finds a place for them to sleep, and lets him grieve. She finds work in the hospitals; they cannot turn away a nurse when so many are dying, even if she isn’t their first choice. Miranda works because that is how she knows to survive; Saal grieves because he is not sure survival is what he wants. In the daylight hours, they rarely speak, but when the majority of the suns set, and it is as dark as it will ever be on Xandar, Saal speaks. Not as a refugee, or as a survivor, but as a boy who has suddenly been thrust into adulthood when he had so many years before him. He speaks of his mother and his brother, and his father makes the occasional vague appearance, and sometime he even speaks about how angry he is, about how the Kree had no right to take away what had been his.

And on the eve of the three week anniversary of their arrival on Xandar, if Miranda enters the small two room apartment they’ve claimed as their own to find Garthan Saal dressed in the training uniform of the Nova Corps, she had never been able to convince herself that she expected anything else.

***

When Miranda returns to Saal’s room several hours later, after a hot meal, a shower and change of clothes, and a few more cups of tea, Peter Quill is no longer there. She hadn’t really expected him to be. She checks Saal’s vitals, makes sure his pain receptors are functioning within comfort levels, and leaves to make her rounds.

When Miranda returns to Saal’s room several hours after that, it’s because her END is screaming about her patient’s vitals. She tears into the room, passing a surprised Peter Quill in the hall, who takes one look at the frightened look on her face, and follows her. Saal is doing nothing so dramatic as seizing, but as his hands clench and release, and his muscles to the same, his eyes begin to move rapidly behind their lids. Peter seems to calm, but Miranda pushes forward to take his vitals manually.

“It’s just a nightmare,” Peter says.

“He doesn’t dream,” she says, diving for the emergency call button before calling into the hall, “I need a crash cart! Heart failure in 387.”

Peter stands helpless as more doctors and nurses arrive and Miranda shuts him out in the hall.

***

Peter Quill is siting against the wall outside Saal’s room when Miranda and a handful of staff emerge hours later. There had been no pressing need for surgery, but the task of stabilizing the man had been time consuming. Miranda puts her back to the wall and joins him, not close enough to be touching, but just so to be noticed.

“He doesn’t dream,” she says quietly. “He hasn’t in a very long time.”

“I would have killed him,” Peter says. “I never thought anything was wrong.”

Miranda picks at the band of her END before disengaging it and slipping it from her wrist.

“Here,” she says, passing it over. “It’s an END, an Emergency Notification Device; it’s specifically coded to Garthan’s biometric sensors and monitors. Anything happens, and you know.”

“You’re his nurse,” Peter says. “You need it to keep him alive.”

“I have five more waiting for me in my locker, all of which can be programmed to monitor Garthan. Take this.”

Peter takes it from her, slipping it over his wrist and hiding it under his jacket sleeve.

***

Miranda is there the first time Saal is rescued from a warzone; the pieces are not so easily put back together this time.

***

Despite what other people think, Miranda does have other patients to see to; she is in surgery with one of them when Saal wakes and dismisses Peter from his room.

She takes her time scrubbing up after the doctor is done, makes herself a cup of tea, and plops down into the chair by his bed, content to wait and let him begin the conversation. He watches her warily, but cannot keep himself from saying,

“This situation is ridiculous.”

“Hhmmm.”

“He’s a criminal.”

“He’s a hero.”

“I just arrested him two weeks ago.”

“And he saved Xandar four days later. I’d like to throw in that he was willing to sacrifice everything to kept Ronan from destroying the entire system, and he is just as scared of this as you are.”

“There’s nothing to be scared of.”

Miranda knows it was not her that taught the man to be so stubborn.

“Garthan,” she says softly. “How do you think he feels? He’s been without you just as long as you’ve been without him. He’s been a criminal for most of his life, and he’s just come home from a battle, one in which he almost lost everyone he ever cared for, to find that his Match is a very reputable and well-respected member of the law enforcement system that has been trying to arrest him for years. He’s scared that you’ll find him inadequate. Just like you’re scared that he’ll find you inadequate.”

“I’ve never been inadequate in my life,” the man in the bed snaps.

“That never stopped you from feeling that way. Just because you’ve decided that you can do everything without your Match, doesn’t mean that it won’t be pleasant to have him around. A Match isn’t your other half, it’s your compliment.”

“Hhmm.”

***

“Saal’s taken himself up to the roof,” someone says over her shoulder, and Miranda turns to look at her fellow nurse as the words register. “Fuck me. Thanks, Q’ati.”

Miranda shoves her lunch back into the bag she brought it in and chucks it into the fridge that all the nurses on the third floor share. She doesn’t run, but her pace is definitely faster than normal as she hauls herself into the elevator and resigns herself to giving Saal the exact same speech she gives him every time he lands in the hospital. 

There’s a garden on the roof. It didn’t take any damage when the Kree invaded, and Miranda is glad because it’s one of the few places patients can go that doesn’t feel like a hospital. Everything is in full bloom this time of year, and this isn’t the first time Saal has lost himself among the foliage looking for a place to think. Miranda just wishes he would wait until he’s clear to leave his room.

There isn’t anyone lingering around the elevator, so when the doors open, Miranda slowly creeps out; since he’s already up here, she doesn’t plan to make him leave right away, but she has been looking after the man for going on thirty years and every once in a while she feels the off notion to check on him.

She finds him when she rounds a corner, seated in a wheelchair next to a bench with his back turned to her. Peter Quill is sitting with him. She takes in the shy duck of Peter’s head, and the tense, but tiring, set of Saal’s shoulders, and settles down on a bench of her own to get a little sun and enjoy the show.


End file.
